[[image:file:C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5COWNER%7E1.YOU%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_image002.jpg width="120" height="158" align="right"]]Mendel was born into a German-speaking family in, Austria (now Czeck Republic). He was the son of Anton and Rosine Mendel and had one elder and also a younger sister. During his childhood, Mendel worked as a gardener, studied bookkeeping, and as a young man attended the Philosophical Institute in Olomouc. Upon recommendation of his physics teacher Friedrich Franz, he entered the Augustinian Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno in 1843. Born Johann Mendel, he took the name Gregor upon entering monastic life. In 1851 he was sent to the University of Vienna to study, returning to his abbey in 1853 as a teacher, principally of physics.
Gregor Mendel, who is known as the "father of modern genetics", was inspired by both his professors at university and his colleagues at the monastery to study variation in plants, and he conducted his study in the monastery's garden. Between 1856 and 1863 Mendel cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants (i.e. Pisum sativum).
Mendel picked common garden pea plants for the focus of his research because they can be grown easily in large numbers and their reproduction can be manipulated. Pea plants have both male and female reproductive organs. As a result, they can either self-pollinate themselves or cross-pollinate with another plant. In his experiments, Mendel was able to selectively cross-pollinate purebred plants with particular traits and observe the outcome over many generations. This was the basis for his conclusions about the nature of genetic inheritance. In cross-pollinating plants that either produced yellow or green pea seeds exclusively, Mendel found that the first offspring generation (f1) always has yellow seeds. However, the following generation (f2) consistently has a 3:1 ratio of yellow to green. It is important to realize that, in this experiment, the starting parent plants were homozygous for pea seed color. That is to say, they each had two identical forms (or alleles) of the gene for this trait--2 yellows or 2 greens. The plants in the f1 generation were all heterozygous. In other words, they each had inherited two different alleles--one from each parent plant. It becomes clearer when we look at the actual genetic makeup, or genotype, of the pea plants instead of only the phenotype, or observable physical characteristics.
Mendel died on January 6, 1884, in Brno, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic), from chronic nephritis.
Gregor Mendel
[[image:file:C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5COWNER%7E1.YOU%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_image002.jpg width="120" height="158" align="right"]]Mendel was born into a German-speaking family in, Austria (now Czeck Republic). He was the son of Anton and Rosine Mendel and had one elder and also a younger sister. During his childhood, Mendel worked as a gardener, studied bookkeeping, and as a young man attended the Philosophical Institute in Olomouc. Upon recommendation of his physics teacher Friedrich Franz, he entered the Augustinian Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno in 1843. Born Johann Mendel, he took the name Gregor upon entering monastic life. In 1851 he was sent to the University of Vienna to study, returning to his abbey in 1853 as a teacher, principally of physics.
Gregor Mendel, who is known as the "father of modern genetics", was inspired by both his professors at university and his colleagues at the monastery to study variation in plants, and he conducted his study in the monastery's garden. Between 1856 and 1863 Mendel cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants (i.e. Pisum sativum).
Mendel picked common garden pea plants for the focus of his research because they can be grown easily in large numbers and their reproduction can be manipulated. Pea plants have both male and female reproductive organs. As a result, they can either self-pollinate themselves or cross-pollinate with another plant. In his experiments, Mendel was able to selectively cross-pollinate purebred plants with particular traits and observe the outcome over many generations. This was the basis for his conclusions about the nature of genetic inheritance. In cross-pollinating plants that either produced yellow or green pea seeds exclusively, Mendel found that the first offspring generation (f1) always has yellow seeds. However, the following generation (f2) consistently has a 3:1 ratio of yellow to green. It is important to realize that, in this experiment, the starting parent plants were homozygous for pea seed color. That is to say, they each had two identical forms (or alleles) of the gene for this trait--2 yellows or 2 greens. The plants in the f1 generation were all heterozygous. In other words, they each had inherited two different alleles--one from each parent plant. It becomes clearer when we look at the actual genetic makeup, or genotype, of the pea plants instead of only the phenotype, or observable physical characteristics.
Mendel died on January 6, 1884, in Brno, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic), from chronic nephritis.